Victims, “Closure,” and the Sociology of Emotion

Bandes discusses the polarizing function of victim impact statements used in the context of the death penalty. The use of victim impact statements is justified in order to promote closure for the victim, but it\u27s unclear what psychological closure can be accomplished from the formal litigation process. Even if victim impact statements do help their authors, in the context of the death penalty the authors are family members of the victim, not the direct victim, and Bandes questions whether it\u27s important to further their interests at the expense of the interests of the defendant. The only recourse for the jury is to deliver a sentence of death, so the statements have the effect of polarizing the conflict in ways that Bandes thinks interfere with promoting justice

In the footsteps of a quiet pioneer: Revisiting Pearl Jephcott’s work on youth leisure in Scotland and Hong Kong

Pearl Jephcott’s (1967) research on Scottish teens, Time of One’s Own, is one of the first sociological studies of leisure in the postwar period. This research is remarkable not only for its emphasis on ‘ordinary’ young people but also for its ambitious and eclectic research design, which incorporates field research, sample surveys and task based participatory methods. The (Re)Imagining Youth team revisited Jephcott’s Scottish research alongside her survey of The Situation of Children and Youth in Hong Kong (1971) as part of a contemporary study of youth leisure and social change. This paper outlines our attempt to reimagine Jephcott’s work for the contemporary context, highlighting the ways in which her method was both a product of its time and ahead of its time

Can Women Become Priests? : A Catholic Feminist Perspective

Can women become priests? The answer to this question depends on whom you ask. For many Protestants, the answer is both yes and no. The only priest is Jesus Christ and all Christian share in the priesthood. As Luther wrote, we are all priests to one another, but there is no special ministry of priesthood that makes one person distinct from others. There are pastors, people who are called to preach and lead worship, but they are not priests. Luther, of course, did not consider women able to be pastors, but his followers (at least the non-Wisconsin or non-Missouri Synod ones) have thought otherwise. But they are not priests. For an Episcopalian who considers him or herself in union with the American and Anglican communions, the answer is yes, although this issue has been a very divisive one within the denomination. At least three dioceses within the American Episcopal Church do not think this question can be answered affirmatively. Indeed, a number of former Episcopal priests have become Roman Catholic priests, largely because of their opposition to women\u27s ordination. But then the Roman Catholic Church does not recognize the priesthood of the Anglican Communion. I will not address here the issue of the Orthodox priesthood, which deserves a separate discussion. These are just a few of the complicating issues surrounding this question

Agency Theory and Supply Chain Management: Goals and Incentives in Supply Chain Organisations

Purpose Agency theory (AT) offers opportunities to examine how the risk of opportunism can be prevented or minimised along supply chain organisations using incentives to achieve goal alignment. Methodology The study presents evidence of how members of such organisations achieve goal alignment through the use of incentives by empirically examining two complete supply chain organisations, including final customers, within the UK agri-food industry using a case study methodology. Findings The findings show that contractual goals can be divided into two different categories, shared supply chain organisational goals, and independent goals of each individual participant. In addition to monitoring ability, incentives can also be classified into short term financial and long term social incentives. Product attributes, in particular credence attributes, are also identified as having implications for both goals and incentives. Research limitations The supply chain perspective and case study methodology mean that the research findings cannot be generalised to other supply chains. A further limitation of the research is the use of different methods of data collection at the final customer point. Practical Implications Managers must ensure that appropriate incentives for all departments and individuals are designed to deliver the strategic goals of the supply chain organisation

Reforming Competence Restoration Statutes: An Outpatient Model

Defendants who suffer from mental illness and are found incompetent to stand trial are often ordered committed to an inpatient mental health facility to restore their competence, even if outpatient care may be the better treatment option. Inpatient facilities are overcrowded and place the defendants on long waiting lists. Some defendants then spend weeks, months, or even years in their jail cell, waiting for a transfer to a hospital bed.Outpatient competence restoration programs promise to relieve this pressure. But even if every state suddenly opened a robust outpatient competence restoration program, an obstacle looms: the statutes governing competence restoration, which default to the inpatient treatment model. Several states mandate inpatient restoration in their statutory scheme. The rest allow for outpatient restoration, but the language of these laws often preserves the inpatient default by requiring defendants to meet a series of nebulous criteria before allowing them to participate in outpatient treatment. This Article is the first to examine how the language of competence restoration statutes, even those that allow for outpatient treatment, defaults to commitment to an inpatient facility. I do so by examining the wide latitude these statutes give to judges to place defendants in inpatient care and show how that discretion, paired with widespread false presumptions about the mentally ill, leads to overcommitment of incompetent defendants in state mental health facilities.I propose amendments to these statutes that will encourage judges to place defendants in outpatient care. Statutes must flip from inpatient-required or inpatient-unless to outpatient-unless, defaulting to outpatient treatment unless some specific criteria justify committing the defendant to an inpatient facility. Such a change would relieve pressure on inpatient facilities, opening up space for those who truly need inpatient treatment for competence to be restored. It would also ensure that specific criteria—not misunderstandings or fears about the mentally ill—inform the decision to commit the defendant to inpatient care

It Doesn\u27t Pass the \u3ci\u3eSell\u3c/i\u3e Test: Focusing on The Facts of the Individual Case in Involuntary Medication Inquiries

Criminal defendants who are incompetent to stand trial have a significant liberty interest in refusing the antipsychotic medication that could restore their competency. The Supreme Court cautioned that instances of intrusion upon that right “may be rare,” and, in Sell v. United States, it laid out what it believed to be stringent criteria for when a defendant could be medicated against his will. Yet, since Sell, trial courts have ordered over sixty-three percent of defendants involuntarily medicated. These individuals did not pose a danger to themselves or others, and they were rarely accused of crimes that involved damage to individuals or property. But the medication of these defendants, once predicted to be “rare,” has instead become routine. In this article, I argue that the overmedication of non-dangerous defendants is a result of the structure of the Sell test and its tilt in favor of the government. The use of a checklist of four threshold elements favors the issuance of medication orders because the court need not balance the defendant’s liberty interest in avoiding medication against the government’s interest in administering it. In addition, three of the four boxes on the checklist concern medical questions about the efficacy and side effects of antipsychotic medication that will fall in the government’s favor in the vast majority of cases. However, while the Sell test contains the seeds of the overmedication problem, it also contains the solution. The first factor of the test requires courts to consider whether the government interest at stake is “important,” and it mandates that courts assess the “facts of the individual case” to determine if the government interest crosses that bar. While few courts have delved deeply into this factor, some have looked to the nonviolent nature of the crime or the government’s minimal likelihood of success on the underlying criminal charge in concluding that the government interest in prosecuting the defendant was not important. I argue that more courts can and should follow this path. Such an approach would limit the involuntary medication of defendants to those exceptional cases where it is truly warranted

Ugly Laws

So-called “ugly laws” were mostly municipal statutes in the United States that outlawed the appearance in public of people who were, in the words of one of these laws, “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” (Chicago City Code 1881). Although the moniker “ugly laws” was coined to refer collectively to such ordinances only in 1975 (Burgdorf and Burgdorf 1975), it has become the primary way to refer to such laws, which targeted the overlapping categories of the poor, the homeless, vagrants, and those with visible disabilities. Enacted and actively enforced between the American Civil War (1867) and World War I (1918), such laws and their enforcement can tell us much about the very sorts of people who were also, a generation later, subject to explicitly eugenic laws, such as sterilization legislation. And like eugenic laws and policies, such laws continue to affect the lives of people with disabilities to this day (Schweik 2011)